‎CONSTANT (Samuel)‎
‎Calls, Sounds and Merchandise of the Peking Street Peddlers‎

‎Peking, The Camel Bell, 1936. 1 volume oblong octavo (19,5*26,5 cm), original silk brocade sewn with silk cord in oriental style, XIV-185 pp, with 61 color-printed and 31 mounted half-tone photographs, very good condition. Ink stamp of the Peking Bookshop, Grand Hôtel des Wagons Lits‎

Reference : 11520

‎First edition of this very rare document on Peking street-vendors, their instruments and their calls. We got this useful information from Mr Quoching Li about the author and his work: "Samuel Victor Constant was born in 1894, a son of a lawyer who once was a student of Oriental languages at the Columbia University and then a member of the Oriental Society. Today we can only find that he was a U. S. Army Captain, came to Beijing in 1923 as an Assistant Military Attaché of the American Legation. In 1924, he went to the front line of the Zhi-Feng War as an observer. The year later, he joined as a representative of the Legation the rescue effort of Harvey James Howard, an American doctor of Union Hospital kidnapped by bandits in Northeast China for about ten weeks. While working for the American Legation, he also attended College of Chinese Studies (Know as California College in China in the U.S.). He received his Master Degree in 1936 with a thesis titled Calls, sounds and merchandise of the Peking street peddler. The typewritten copy of this thesis is 103 pages long, with color illustrations and photos, 20 by 27 cm in size, currently hold by Occidental College Library, California.In the same year, a revised and typeset edition was published by Camel Bell in Beijing. The University of California at Berkeley owns one copy of this edition. It is under the same title but 187 pages long, has photos, black/white and color illustrations. Constant signed his name in Chinese as Kang Shidan, and thanked in the Preface his teacher and friend Chin Yue-po, the College Dean William B. Pettus, for their guide and help on producing this work. ‎